Corporate Performance Management Moving to the Cloud

Of the total on premise deployments, 49 percent of those surveyed said they are considering migrating their deployment to the cloud, the report found.

Corporate performance management (CPM) solutions are growing in popularity with a near-perfect 98 percent satisfaction rate among customers, and a majority of customers surveyed are looking to increase their CPM budgets over the next few years, according to a Nucleus Research market survey.
Only four percent of customers expect to decrease their CPM budget in the coming years.
Of the total on premise deployments, 49 percent of those surveyed said they are considering migrating their deployment to the cloud, and 34 percent consider the cloud as their primary platform for CPM deployments.
"Cloud deployments reduce the level of IT resource requirements, hardware and system costs," Nina Sandy, principal analyst at Nucleus Research, told eWeek. "Software updates and system upgrades are handled by the vendor a cloud environment, and as a result, minimize the impact on the users, and reduce IT costs."

Sandy explained that generally, the implementation times are shorter, primarily due to the reduced requirement for onsite hardware and software to support the systems, and there is a cash flow advantage for software as a service (SaaS) applications.

"The outlay of cost for onsite systems, maintenance and support, and the variety of purchasing strategies including subscription pricing have made the cloud more attractive," she said. "The concerns regarding security of the systems, and protection of the data have started to dissipate as SaaS and cloud implementations are becoming more common and proven, and the technology has improved."
Hybrid implementations, where parts of the solution are in the cloud and some on premise, represent 20 percent of the customers surveyed.
The survey indicated cloud was a still a decision factor, with 49 percent of on premise customers considering migrating to the cloud within the next two years.
Expanded functionality was noted by 45 percent of the respondents as the reason for adopting CPM, driven by an effort to increase the return on investment (ROI) of their solution.
The trend in the data indicates that by 2020, less than 20 percent of customers’ CPM deployments will be entirely on premise.
While IBM, Infor, Oracle, and SAP continue to be the first to mind CPM vendors, Sandy said other cloud vendors are making advances within the market, including Adaptive Insights, Board International, Host Analytics, and QPR are becoming much more known and are occupying shortlist with customers with increasing frequency.
Respondents were also asked to choose the top two factors that drove their CPM solution decision, with 45 percent of the customers stating increased accessibility to new functionality was a driving factor for choosing a solution.
Thirty percent chose on the basis of usability, and 19 percent chose on the basis of integration, while only six percent indicated total cost of ownership (TCO) was a driving factor, indicating customers are choosing their organizations’ ability to be more productive over the cost of the solutions.
"Businesses are looking for ease of use and ease of deployment overall. They are looking to streamline processes and increase user adoption and involvement in processes – especially in budgeting and forecasting," Sandy said. "Organizations struggle with spreadsheet proliferation where controlling the quality and trust in the spreadsheet data can add weeks and months to the budgeting process. They are seeking systems to alleviate those challenges and make the focus of the process about making decisions and not worrying about formulas."